Dealing with the hostage-takers: the Jewish tradition of making choices

Last night I had a childish thought. It just flashed through my mind and was gone.

I thought that perhaps if we all prayed very hard, then tomorrow (today), when the time comes for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to be returned home, they will be alive.

No, Imshin, not childish. Compassionate, caring, optimistic--the very heart of the Jewish tradition. It was Hitler who said conscience was a Jewish invention. One of the very few things on which he was right. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. The Talmudic view: All Israel is responsible for one another.

And not only we Jews have this literally heartfelt commitment of identification with the plight of all political hostages and their families. When the Irish/British aid worker Margaret Hassan was kidnapped in Iraq and finally cynically videoed being murdered, I had so much hoped she would be safely released along with the others--and so did the overwhelming majority of the people of every ethnic group in Britain not marching under the deluded enrage banner of the SWP and the Islamists. And there is no shortage of cases of British and European governments making gruesome deals with kidnappers and murderers for the safe release of their kidnapped nationals.

I mean, I’m all for concessions for peace: but what is the policy aim, here?

The comments on David T's post are interesting, but I thought almost all were too wrapped up in the current and recent history of Israel, and, unsurprisingly for a strongly secularist socialist blog, ignorant of the specifically religious tradition behind Israel's policies.

This is an edited version of the comment I posted in response:

It is a specific Torah commandment that the Jewish people must redeem their captives. This is something Jewish communities having been doing with a heavy heart since the days of Ancient Israel, and it is recalled in the daily prayer services. Joel Brand and his colleagues from the Jewish Agency tried to negotiate with Eichmann in 1944 for the release of the Hungarian Jews in return for arms but understandably the Allies refused. That huge community was then shipped off to Auschwitz and almost all murdered on arrival. This is why it is enshrined in secular Israeli policy and practice and continues to have such huge resonance with Israelis.

But there is another minority orthodox Jewish tradition on how to deal with tragic kidnap- communal ransom situations. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in Germany was imprisoned in the Middle Ages by the secular leader of the Christian West, the Holy Roman Emperor, for ransom, but the rabbi gave orders that he must not be ransomed lest others be kidnapped. He died in prison.

During the Holocaust, the rabbis and secular leadership of the Nazi-occupied communities of Eastern Europe sometimes faced equally impossible choices imposed by their captors, often demands to give up the names or the persons of Nazi targets in return for the release of innocent arrested rabbis or communal leaders otherwise condemned to execution. Their rulings sometimes reluctantly complied with the demands in the name of sacrificing the few for the many, but sometimes adopted positions from outright refusal to evasion, on the grounds of not assisting in the murder of fellow Jews even at the hands of a murderous coercive ruler. Few truly realized that all without exception were marked out for extermination by their captors. None did anything other than try their best for the sake of their people.

There is now in Israel a movement of soldiers who are organizing declarations that they do not want to be redeemed if captured. There is also the Torah law that you must not frame your arrangements in such ways that it needlessly leads to deaths.

I am no expert in Jewish law, but I believe that because of this deal and the declared commitment by the terror groups and supporting governments to kidnap more and more Israelis to force Israel to release its hundreds of convicted and unrepentant terrorist murderers of civilians, Israel should change the policy now. I’ll be interested to see how the most influential rabbis in Israel comment.

Rabbi Meir’s approach has its source in the Mishnah which rules that one does not ransom captives for more than their value because of Tikkun Olam. The Talmud disputes the rationale for the Mishnah’s stipulation.One view is that it is intended to prevent the impoverishment of the Jewish community which would otherwise make extortionate ransom payments; the other is to avoid providing an incentive to the kidnappers to continue in their ways. Both Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch adopt the second rationale. While both maintain that there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives, ultimately, public security considerations take precedence when evaluating whether to pay a ransom. Interestingly, Tosafot maintain that where there is a danger to life, captives may be redeemed for more than their value, but this position has not been codified.

Application of Jewish law to contemporary prisoner exchanges is not straightforward. Two questions are particularly difficult to resolve. The first is how to establish the value of a captured soldier. The second, related question is how to apply Jewish law where the ransom payment consists of convicted terrorists instead of financial capital. In classical times, the question of value could readily be resolved by resort to the slave market or the market rate for the ransom of non-Jewish captives, but the question today is obviously far more complex. Moreover, as the payment consists of convicted terrorists, the state must engage in an unenviable balancing act, weighing the rights of the individual against the security needs of the country. What is clear, however, is that as a general rule, captives should not be redeemed for more than their value if it is reasonably believed that paying the ransom will increase kidnappings and thereby pose a threat to the public. In fact, former Israel Defense Forces Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was opposed to lopsided prisoner exchanges, noting that the safety of one or a few Jews in captivity does not take precedence over the safety of the entire public.

A growing number of senior defense and security experts, including the heads of the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), believe that the “more than fair value” test has once again proven relevant.

As Israelis lacking any family or other connection to the Goldwasser/Regev families, we are convinced that the current skewed deal threatens the public interest, undermines Israel’s ability to defend its legal rights and carry out its legal duties, and could threaten Israel’s strategic objectives. The optimal position, of course, is to rely on military action to free captured soldiers and/or civilians as in the famous Entebbe rescue. If such a rescue is not a viable option, any negotiations should be conducted within the context of national security objectives.

When Israel makes exchanges that are unequal, it is only natural for Israel’s enemies to view the illegal kidnapping of Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the violation of their legal rights in captivity, as an extremely profitable activity. These exchanges present Israel as willing to concede all its legal rights and to accommodate any and all demands of terrorist organizations. Additionally, by bestowing undeserved largesse upon terrorist groups like Hizbullah, these exchanges strengthen that group’s leverage as a political actor in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and enhance its support on the Arab street. Hizbullah has been able to successfully negotiate the release of a celebrated Lebanese terrorist, extract information on four missing Iranian diplomats, and secure the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.

The Goldwasser/Regev deal – as a deviation from the Geneva Conventions model – discourages compliance with international humanitarian law, harms Israeli deterrence, encourages future kidnappings, and endangers the lives of those who may be taken hostage by Hizbullah or another terrorist group. The value Israel places on a single life is laudable, but its translation into a policy of capitulation to terrorist kidnappers’ demands magnifies the already grossly inflated price of prisoner exchanges. For terrorist organizations, kidnapped Israeli soldiers and civilians are valuable and relatively cheaply-acquired bargaining chips to bring home their terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails. As Yoram Shachar, the brother of policeman Eliahu Shachar who was murdered in a terrorist attack involving Kuntar, said: “The release today is the kidnapping of tomorrow.”

As if in response to this article, one of the press reports on the day of the exchange included this policy commitment to the future use of kidnapping as leverage on the Israeli government by a spokesman of one of the terrorist groups, together with the most enthusiastic support for Hezbollah's "achievements" by Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate PA president and Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza:

Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, told Ynet that the completion of the deal "even after the images of the Israeli soldiers' coffins, proves that kidnapping soldiers will continue to be the most efficient, favored and ideal way to release Palestinian prisoners, particularly those defined by the enemy as having blood on their hands."

According to Abu Mujehad, the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance will continue to work to kidnap soldiers in order to release prisoners "and in order to retrieve our rights, after it has been proved beyond any doubt that no diplomatic negotiations can release prisoners or return rights."

My belief is that where it is an unambiguously declared policy of Israel's enemies, both state and non-state actors, to use kidnap as a major weapon in their struggle to destroy Israel, then Israel's present policy forces it into a position where it effectively concedes in advance all the demands that its enemies care to make. Why should Hamas agree to the release of Gilad Shalit for less than the release of every last convicted terrorist prisoner in Israeli jails? What if required the concession is agreeing to the demand for the Palestinian "right of return"? Or the concession of Israeli territory demanded by Syria or Hezbollah? Indeed some of the most fulsome adulation of Nasrallah you can read in is in praise of the successful outcome of his declared strategy in 2006 of kidnapping soldiers to release prisoners, which he then put into practice with the kidnap of Goldwasser and Regev from Israeli territory in the first place.

Norm's post today takes to task the latest Guardian editorial on the subject for what he reads as its celebration of an Israeli "moral defeat". I don't read the Guardian editorial quite that way. It's interesting that its analysis of the outcome of the Israeli agreement is not that different from that of the impeccably zionist lawyers who wrote the article I've cited at length above.

Both the leader and the article point out that in dealing with Hezbollah as the equivalent of a state actor, Israel has conceded a level of recognition and validation it previously lacked. However, that was already conceded by the results of Hezbollah's successful assault on the Lebanese political settlement earlier this summer, allied with the fresh consolidation of Syria's nominees into the Presidency and Prime Ministership in Beirut.

Yael's blog yesterday had a reference to a Facebook group of Lebanese who deplored the release of the most notorious terrorist murderer, Samir Kuntar, who has been ecstatically celebratedin Lebanon, Gaza and by the Palestinian Authority as a supreme hero, despite the fact that his "heroism" was based on breaking into a flat, shooting a father in front of his four year old daughter and then repeatedly bludgeoning and smashing the skull of the child to death. Lisa's post on Pajamas Media offers further evidence that not every Lebanese was celebrating, despite the shameful participation of the leader of every single Lebanese political party in the rally celebrating Kuntar on his release, including the leaders of those who had fought against Hezbollah. Now Lebanon has a very significant reckoning of the appalling cost to the Lebanese people of Nasrallah's "triumph", quoted by Lisa; Neil D on Harry's Place reports the Lebanese Political Journal's sardonic condemnation of those "achievements:

While that's heartening, it's unfortunately not significant where the compassionate of heart are in a tiny and politically insignificant minority. Sophie Scholl and her tiny band of active German oppositionists to the wartime Nazi regime are now revered; at the time, their protests were isolated and futile. I remember with appreciation the gesture of the gentile warden of my grandfather's Berlin synagogue who brought round his rescued top hat from the flames the day after the Nazi mobs had burned it down. But it did not alter the fate of my grandfather and uncle, deported in chains to the Polish border, or hold back the enthusiastically supported rush of the Nazi regime to the subsequent invasion of Poland with all that followed.

And this compassion and grief which is being tutted over in the world's press is what continues to unite Israel. My hope is that the tradition of Jewish law and the wisdom of the rabbis and communal leaders of the past will open the way to finding a not-so-new path of facing down and overcoming the challenge of Islamist and radical marxist terrorism and hostage-taking.

Am Yisroel Chai-- The people of Israel lives, which today tends to be a triumphalist slogan of the Israeli right. But I mean by invoking it a salute to the future of Israel, for it lives in the sense of being on the side of life.

Comments

"one does not ransom captives for more than their value because of Tikkun Olam"

Three observations:

1. It is impossible to establish 'value' in such a case (I speak as an economist)

2. I don't think lawyers could have helped to reach the handover decision

3. The most moral way to make the decision was the way that the Cabinet chose: to assess public opinion and act accordingly. 60% of Israelis supported the decision. Ideally there would be a referendum of all adult Israelis who have served (or will do so) in the IDF, plus their immediate families - but that's impractical

May the Goldwasser and Regev families be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem

I agree with the vast majority of what you say. But I don't agree the Palestinians will back out of the Peace arnmeeegt. They will wait until the facts are on the ground. They have 95% of the West Bank. then..and only then, they will find a pretext to do with the Temple Mount to declare another intifada. They will have all these concessions in 'concrete', the high ground, and what have they offered in return? Peace. Which will quickly be pulled away under another pretext.The sad thing is the Western World is so delusional, they believe the Pals want peace. They don't want peace , they want Israel, and they will do what they have to in the interim to get it.You think withdrawal from Gaza had empty promises?AaronVisit:

This is truly sad and tragic. I susepct the center you describe is one I visited and played basketball myself in the past (Deane Hill Drive?). Growing up I knew several Jewish families. Many were on my swim team.They were all some of the best people I've ever known. I never had a bad experience with any of them. I was also taught at the Catholic grade school I attended a great deal of respect for the Jewish people. I am quite upset with the current Pope's position on the current conflict.The aims of the radical Islamists is nothing short of genocide. I don't now why some of the leftists can't recognize this. Or maybe, as you suggest, they are anti-Semitic. At best, they have grossly misplaced sympathies.

Hi: I am a catholic man with a jewsih wife. Though both religions tend to take a proprietary interest in the offspring of their flocks, my wife and I decided to let the children decide. Our oldest is more or less christian by choice. My middle child--11 years old--is jewsih. I walk him through the security check points you describe at his camps and temple and hebrew school. The mixture of anger and fear this creates in me is vexxing. I, too, hope the friday shooting was isolated; but, somehow, I doubt it.